


The Wheelers' living room, April 1984.

by alteritymonster



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25375411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alteritymonster/pseuds/alteritymonster
Summary: This one's angsty, friends. It is, yeah, basically a coronavirus-in-the-80s au. Don't worry, nobody dies in it, or even gets sick. There is some introspective body horror stuff though. And lots of angst. And some little confused Byler exchanges, as a treat!
Relationships: Will Byers/Mike Wheeler
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	The Wheelers' living room, April 1984.

The president listened to the reporter's question with an expression of calm assurance on his face, features fixed in a disarming grin. Then cocking his head at a jaunty angle, his sculpted hair gleaming in the television lights, he spoke.

"Well Helen, facts are stupid things—stubborn things, I should say. The fact is that this virus, with which we find ourselves at war today, is a Russian virus. I have made no apology for being frank with the American people about this fact, nor will I. The Soviet Union's rulers have told the world that American servicemen were to blame for the earliest cases of disease. My heart and best intentions still tell me that isn't true. While Dr. Koop and I have made daily appearances before the American public since the beginning of the crisis, Mr. Andropov hasn't been seen in public even once since last August. Whether intentionally or not, the Soviets have spread this new virus to the nations of the free world, while their Communist rulers won't even tell us honestly who is in charge inside the walls of the Kremlin. Those facts speak for themselves."

"Follow-up question, sir? Thank you. What is your response to critics who charge that you are planning to reopen American business prematurely, given that virus cases still continue to rise?"

The president chuckled amiably. "Well, it is not up to me or any government official to tell American businessmen and -women how to pursue their own best interests. Every person chooses the risks he or she will take to provide for themselves or their families, as we have always enjoyed the freedom to do under our system of government. That spirit of free enterprise is what makes the United States of America exceptional in the world. Free people must never live in fear, not of a virus, or even of nuclear holocaust. The future does not belong to the fainthearted. It belongs to the brave."

Reporters seated six feet apart broke in with new questions. After a moment one of them gained the floor. "Mr. President, any comment on comparisons with your administration's response to the AIDS crisis? Some have been asking—" _Click._

Mike looked up at his dad. "Why did you turn it off?"

Ted Wheeler turned to walk into the other room. "No need for you to hear about... all that other stuff. Ronnie told 'em." He crossed the foyer into the dining room and sat down at the table. Mike could hear from the living room the noise of the computer on the dining room table starting up, knew it would soon be connected to the mainframe at his dad's work and tying up the phone line until it was time to eat dinner. His dad being at home during the week, and Mike not going to school himself, were just two things he had had to get used to lately. Six weeks of this and Hawkins Middle still hadn't figured out a system to distribute homework regularly to students. Until they did there wasn't much for Mike to do apart from reading some of the books Mr. Clarke had loaned him personally. He had to think for a moment before he could be sure it was a Wednesday. It might have been any other day of the week.

Mike sighed listlessly and got up from the couch. He picked up his backpack from a peg on the wall by the front door and pulled it over both shoulders. It was heavy, but not with school books. He took a bandana out of one of its pockets and tied it loosely around his neck, so he could easily pull it up over his face when he needed to. Without looking toward the dining room Mike said, "I'm going over to Will's." Ted glanced up for just a moment. "You look like a damn bank robber," was all he said; he was already staring into the terminal's screen again when Mike looked his way at this. Their eyes hadn't met. His dad had been joking, kind of, but Mike still felt a little rattled, like he really was doing _something_ wrong. He didn't know why he didn't like telling his dad when he was going to Will's, when it didn't bother him to tell his mom, or even to tell his dad when he was going to Lucas or Dustin's house.

**Mirkwood**

He kept his face uncovered for the bike ride, needing to breathe rapidly with the effort of pushing the pedals and nobody being nearby anyway. Besides, he knew that some people in town would give him dirty looks if he did have his face covered. Slowing after turning onto Mirkwood, at about halfway down the stretch of it that took him to Will's he stopped and stood with the frame of the bike between his legs. Catching his breath, looking out into the forest, not really expecting to see her... and as always when he stood here and thought this, he wasn't pleasantly surprised as he always hoped to be. Still, just to "observe protocol" as he called it to himself, he got his walkie-talkie out of the backpack and extended its antenna.

"Eleven, come in Eleven. Can you hear me? It's Mike. This is day one hundred and sixty-five, it's 2:09pm. Come in please, El. Over." Counting in his head, slowly, to five, ten, twenty. "Eleven..." _Are you alive? Have you gotten sick? Can your powers protect you?_ "I'll talk to you again later, El." _I don't know if I can take it, all of this, if every day feels like this for another hundred sixty-five days..._ "Mike, over and out."

After he put the walkie-talkie away and started pumping the bike's pedals again, he thought back to that night. El pinning the Demogorgon to the wall of Mr. Clarke's classroom, saving all five of them, and then disappearing. Mike couldn't let himself get his hopes up, knowing he didn't really understand her powers. But for the same reason he couldn't be sure it was impossible, what he'd been imagining lately. She could push the Demogorgon with her mind, make Mike levitate, break Troy's arm. It was mind over matter for sure, but did that work like the Force in Star Wars? If she could also disappear, Mike reasoned, did it work instead, or also, like the transporter on Star Trek? In Mike's fantasy El stretched out a hand toward someone's body—Will's, Lucas's, his own, anyone's—causing it to glow with a bright yellow-white color for a few seconds, rearranging the atoms and molecules inside. Leaving the person the same, unchanged... except for the virus, if it was in them, gone. Disappeared. She had been, to Mike's mind, a weapon; could she also be a healer? His mind lingered on two things from that night in November at the last, as it always would now. First, his hand and her hand touching. He could almost feel the pressure of her hand squeezing his own back. Second, as she disappeared, the tears beginning to fall down his face. A few more welled up in his eyes now as he sped up on the bike. It was a windy day.

**Castle Byers**

Will lay on his back on the fort's makeshift bed, staring up at the grey overcast sky through the slats of the ceiling. Jonathan's latest mixtape played on low volume, a Gary Numan song Will thought was creepy but kind of cool.

 _You quote from 'anxious' and things we do  
I need protection from the likes of you  
  
_He'd had to spend a lot of time alone at home lately. His mom still had to go to work at Melvald's like normal, despite everything. With Hawkins High School closed, Jonathan was using the free time to pick up more shifts at his job. Joyce insisted unwaveringly that Will stay home, not venturing out farther than the woods behind the house. She'd never been more protective of her younger son than since his time in the Upside Down. He knew she hated having to worry about coming home carrying the virus, knew that she, and Jonathan too, were losing sleep wondering what happened if any of them got sick. Will hated seeing both of them looking so tired, Joyce even more than her job already would make her. He could tell lately that sometimes, on days she had worked, she even pulled back from showing Will affection with a hug or, more embarrassing but all the more badly missed now, tickle attack. It was for the most loving reason, Will knew; why did knowing that make him feel worse, make him feel guilty? Since it had started getting warmer again it had been easier some nights just to sleep out here, drifting off to Jonathan's dubbed new wave.

Will did find himself dreaming of the Upside Down less recently, but not for a lack of thinking about it during the day. The wind blowing through the door of the fort right now made him think of the cold in that parallel not-place. He'd remember the tendrils of whatever it was living everywhere there, reaching deep down his throat squeezing his lungs, the acrid mold taste of the spores floating in the air there filling him. A scent of that stale corruption had clung to him faintly for days after he woke in the hospital, traces of the Upside Down seeping out of his own grey sallow skin. There'd also been that moment at Christmas, standing at the bathroom sink, that he couldn't be sure he hadn't imagined... In the new virus he felt he could see evidence he was responsible for the new state of things, as if by mere exposure to the Upside Down he had brought this disease back with him into the real world. It was crazy, he knew, as much as when his stomach flipped thinking about.. that other disease, the one they were also talking about still on TV sometimes...

 _Do you begin to see that I don't know?  
I live on memories that are hard to find  
  
_"Will? Are you okay?"

The two boys sat in front of Castle Byers, spaced six feet apart, on chairs Will dragged outside from the kitchen table. They both had bandanas pulled up over their noses and mouths. A few weeks ago Will had drawn on a bandana in permanent marker for each one of the party, to reflect their D&D character classes. For Dustin, the bard, a pied triskelion that Will had traced from an encyclopedia rendering of the flag of the Isle of Man, suggesting somehow both a performer or jester, and a medieval friar militant. For Lucas, the ranger, a two-tone design managing to resemble the lower half of a ninja's hood: not quite to the D&D manual's model of a ranger, but Lucas had been delighted. Mike's mask was vertically striped so that it looked like the grille of a paladin's armor helmet. For himself, Will had drawn semicircles in grey marker that, overlooking the fact that the whole thing also covered his nose, brought to his friends' minds the tufts of the long pointed beard grown by his character, Will the Wise.

It was a two-character side quest, not a major campaign of Mike's, just an excuse to spend a little time together really. Paladin and cleric together easily solved the riddle of the miasmic havoc-fairies, who duly returned the stricken village's children from the disappearing forest as promised. The tavern's half-mad doggerel-poet revealed himself to be none other than King Tristan in disguise, praising the heroes' fine deeds and bestowing on them a trove of magical coarsegold. Mike raised up one arm in a Luke Skywalker lightsaber pose to show Will how solemnly Tristan gifted the precious metal into the hands of the heroes on bended knee. Will grinned unselfconsciously at Mike's performance, virus and the Upside Down for the moment forgotten. Finally though, Mike did close the dungeon master's book and reluctantly stand up.

"Well, I guess I'd better get going," Mike said. Will nodded, eyes locked with Mike's. They hadn't high-fived or hugged, as they would usually at the end of a successful quest. Each of them felt uneasy for a moment, unable to see the other's lower face, unsure quite what the other meant when he spoke. Mike didn't see that Will's gaze was matched with lips slightly parted, uncertain, expectant; he could think only of the flash of first sight of Will in his hospital bed, shrunken and tired but alive, and the sensations of throwing his arms around him and holding tight. Will didn't see Mike's pursed lips as he turned his head away, couldn't see that the turn of his head said not "bye then" but meant "here we go, here goes nothing."

"I brought you something." Before he lost his nerve—though not sure what he needed nerve for right now—Mike reached into his backpack and pulled out the largest, if not the heaviest, thing it had been holding. It was a giant frog plushie. Will's expression, no more readable than before, stayed the same as far as Mike could tell. "It's just... Nancy gave me this last Christmas and it's dumb but it would, I thought it maybe, can remind you of me since I can't... Don't worry, my mom put it through the laundry and all." Mike said, all in a rush, sputtering to a stop.

Will's smile crinkled the edges of his bandana. "A frog stuffed animal? from a frogf—"

"Shut up. Dork." Mike leaned forward and wagged the arms of the frog, suggesting a tickling attack being engaged. Will couldn't stop a little fit of giggling, glancing away and touching the back of his head shyly. "It's cool, I like it." "Cool."

Another silence. Finally Mike just waved shyly, leaving the frog on the chair he had just been sitting on. Then he turned to walk back to his bike, awkwardly craning his head back halfway to give another smile Will couldn't quite see, making a thumbs-up for good measure. Will waved back grinning ear to ear, which even Mike did notice, even through the mask. Mike disappeared around the side of the Byers house, and then Will was left with the frog waiting on the other chair, six feet away.


End file.
